Oleksandr Freidin
1926–1984 Landscape painter of the "severe style"
Represented in the collection with a view of Arcadia, Odesa.
Born in Odesa in 1926. In 1937 his father was shot as an "enemy of the people" and the family was exiled. He returned to Odesa after the war and studied at the Art School under Dina Frumina (1948–1951).
After a rift with his teacher, he found his own path in the studio of Oleksandr Atsmanchuk — also represented in this collection. His landscapes of the 1960s to early 1970s are powerful and elemental; the piece in this collection belongs to that period.
He spent five years on "Funeral in Madrid" (1969–1974), a requiem for the victims of Stalin's repressions that alluded to his own father's fate. The work was banned from exhibition in Kyiv. Today his paintings are held in the Odesa Museum of Modern Art and the Norton Dodge Collection (USA), alongside Yegorov and Mezhberg.